The Hills Are Alive

I had come to see herds of elephants and giraffes nibbling acacia branches, but after several hours driving around the park the most prevalent mammals seemed to be warthogs, zebras, and long-horned cattle.

“Where are all the lions and leopards?” I asked park ranger Daniel Nishimwe. “Eaten,” he explained, “by starving survivors of the 1994 genocide.”

“We started repopulating the park several years ago,” he quickly added, “and now have 22 lions, 11 species of antelope, and some black rhinos in addition to giraffes, elephants, hippos, buffalo, and leopards. It just takes a while for them to get comfortable and reproduce.”

If Americans have difficulty remembering what happened in Rwanda in 1994, it’s probably because they were preoccupied at the time with O. J. Simpson, the Tonya Harding scandal, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The few newspapers with correspondents in Africa tended to mischaracterize the massacre as a continuation of a four-year civil war pitting Hutu farmers, who controlled the country, against Tutsi herdsmen, under attack for the past 30 years. Just another tribal war, folks. Nothing to see here.

Violence began on April 6 that year when the plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down on its approach to Kigali airport. By the next day Hutu extremists had seized control of the government and directed mobs armed with clubs and machetes to set up roadblocks and begin killing Tutsis—and any person moderate enough to support them. Tutsis were easy to identify since every Rwandan was required to carry a national identity card stamped with his or her ethnicity.

Among the first to fall were 10 U.N. Blue Berets from Belgium. The slaughter was so savage that Rwanda’s former colonial master immediately withdrew from further U.N. peacekeeping efforts. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali then asked Washington to intercede. But the Clinton administration, still reeling from the 1993 “Blackhawk down” fiasco in Somalia, wanted nothing more to do with an intervention in Africa.

Hutu machete attacks often resulted in prolonged agony. Mutilations were common, as was sexual violence against women. Babies were smashed against rocks or thrown alive into pit latrines. By the middle of May garbage trucks in Kigali had collected 60,000 bodies and buried them in mass graves.

“Brutality here does not end with murder,” reported the Economist. “At massacre sites, corpses, many of them children, have been methodically dismembered and the body parts stacked neatly in separate piles.”

By June bodies were piling up at the rate of 10,000 a day, but for French president François Mitterrand the real concern was that the French-speaking Hutu might lose Rwanda to the English-speaking Tutsi army marching south. Not since defeats in Indochina and Algeria had Paris lost a member of la Francophonie, the international union of French-speaking countries. To prevent that outcome he ordered 80 tons of weaponry flown to Kigali. The shipment included thousands of fragmentation grenades intended for use against the “Khmer Noir.” Hutu génocidaires instead threw them into crowds of Tutsi refugees.

When the violence finally abated 100 days later, almost 1.1 million people lay dead. Seventy-five percent of the Tutsi population inside the country had been killed, as well as the vast majority of moderate political and civic voices.

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I came to Rwanda with a production company filming Rwanda: The Royal Tour, a travel documentary that will air on PBS on April 26. The Royal Tour series was created by Peter Greenberg, the CBS travel editor who convinces heads of state like Jordan’s King Abdullah and leaders like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to spend a week showing him around their countries while the cameras are rolling. Greenberg has produced seven Royal Tours, but timing a tourism documentary to coincide with the 24th anniversary of Africa’s most horrific genocide seemed unusual.

“When I told people I was going to Rwanda they told me to be careful and stay safe, but their concern is based on circumstances that no longer exist,” says Greenberg. “The Gallup Global Law and Order report rates Rwanda as the second-safest country (after Algeria) in Africa. The World Bank ranks it No. 1 when it comes to the ease of doing business. As for cleanliness, there’s no dispute that Kigali is the cleanest city in Africa. Rwanda really has a lot to offer.”

The astonishing turnaround from genocide to safety and growth is mostly owed to Paul Kagame, a bespectacled 60-year-old former guerrilla leader who grew up in a Ugandan refugee camp after his Tutsi parents were forced to flee Kigali in 1960 in advance of a Hutu mob. Despite his Rwandan nationality, Kagame first fought in Uganda and may be the only military commander to have received training both in Castro’s Cuba and at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Kagame’s military career was strikingly successful: At age 22 he fought with the forces that toppled Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Almost two decades later he ended Rwanda’s genocide leading an army largely composed of Tutsi refugees. In 1996, following repeated border incursions by Hutu génocidaires based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kagame, then 39, sent Rwanda’s tiny army into a country more than three times the size of Texas and toppled dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

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Over the 24 years Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) party has been in power, the economy has grown between 7 and 8 percent a year. Per capita income of $150 at the end of the genocide now stands at $700 and is expected to climb to $1,100 by 2020. Rwanda remains the world’s 20th-poorest country, but life expectancy is up and infant mortality is down. Health improvements stem from the fact that 91 percent of the population has medical insurance and everyone in Rwanda’s 15,000 villages receives free eye care. Medications and blood-test results are delivered directly to individual homes in remote locations by drones operated by a Silicon Valley company called Zipline. Flying from two distribution centers, the fixed-wing drones can carry up to four pounds of cargo and have a round-trip range of 99 miles.

Foreign aid donors provide almost all of Rwanda’s health budget, as they do in many other African nations. But in Rwanda the money actually gets spent on its intended purpose.

A commitment to the environment is evident the moment one debarks at the airport in Kigali; plastic bags carried by incoming passengers are summarily shredded. Outside the terminal, the streets leading into town are free of litter, graffiti, homeless encampments, and prostitutes. Traffic flows in an orderly fashion, and there are no vendors coming up to cars at stoplights.

Most African countries have presentable capitals with some nice neighborhoods and clean streets. What distinguishes Kagame’s administration is the effort to bring government benefits to rural areas as well. He has used aid money not only to improve highways but also to build a fiber-optic network, which provides remote districts with cell phone reception and Internet connectivity. Recently, a San Francisco company called Off Grid Electric began installing solar panels atop homes, allowing families to charge their phones, have lighting at night, and avoid the expense of buying kerosene.

Special efforts are made to keep rural communities cohesive. The Girinka program, initiated in 2006, gives dairy cows to poor families to improve nutrition. The family repays the government by giving their cow’s first calf to a needy neighbor.

Rich and poor alike are expected to work the last Saturday of every month with their neighbors to clean and improve their surroundings. Known as umuganda, these national days of community service often are spent building schools. As a result, 90 percent of Rwanda’s youth now attend school where many receive a laptop computer to share with other students.

“Paul Kagame has made amazing progress despite having inherited one of the most tragic situations in the developing world,” says former Haitian prime minister Laurent Lamothe, 45, who now heads the Miami-based Global Voice Group, which provides technological telecommunication solutions to developing countries. “He’s a dedicated conservationist working to make Rwanda into a premier tourist destination. I understand why the people of Rwanda have elected him three times.”

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The popularity of the RPF is undeniable. But its electoral success is spectacular enough to send mixed signals. When Kagame ran for president in 2003 and 2010 he was elected with 95 and 93 percent of the vote, respectively. Had he retired from politics in 2017 and accepted a U.N. sinecure, he would be revered as the George Washington of Rwanda. But in 2015 the RPF proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the two-term limit for presidents. And last August Paul Kagame was reelected for a third term with 98 percent of the vote. Theoretically, he could tack on two more five-year terms when he comes up for reelection in 2024, extending his rule to 2034.

Kagame’s long goodbye does not seem to have damaged him domestically, but NGOs and academics believe he and his party risk going down the dark path earlier trod by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and South Africa’s African National Congress. Rwanda’s “development miracle” now often is described as “impressive but repressive.”

“He’s been in power since 1994,” notes Ruth Iyob, an Africa specialist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis Center for International Studies. “Is 24 years going to turn into 40? Rwanda is clean and runs well, but so did Mussolini’s Italy.”

Kagame insists his role models are Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, and Human Rights Watch, however, believe his successes are tarnished by press intimidation and the exile or imprisonment of political opponents.

Rwanda’s president is a complicated politician who governs in a challenging corner of the world. Is he autocratic or merely authoritarian? After ending the genocide he abolished the death penalty, released thousands of prisoners to participate in the country’s reconciliation process, took a strong stand against homophobia, encouraged women to run for government office, and removed all ethnic and social references from identification cards. His “One Rwanda” policy is strictly enforced to the point of penalizing those who openly advocate divisiveness.

According to the “Global Competitiveness Report,” Rwanda is the best place in Africa to be a woman. Women occupy 64 percent of the seats in parliament, hold 42 percent of the cabinet posts, and fill 40 percent of the judgeships on the Rwandan supreme court.

These reforms don’t feel like the acts of a traditional African strongman.

On the third day of The Royal Tour filming, action shifted to the mountains surrounding Lake Kivu in the western part of the country. Greenberg and the president were scheduled to ride bicycles down a hill while wiry competition cyclists belonging to Bike Rwanda zoomed up. The scene would give Kagame the opportunity to dramatize for viewers why Rwanda is known as the Land of 1,000 Hills. In the afternoon they would take jet skis out on Lake Kivu.

That morning I asked Kagame about international criticism of his administration. I approached Rwanda’s president while a PBS technician was attaching a camera to the handlebar of his bike and after exchanging pleasantries brought up criticisms that Rwanda’s democracy falls short of Western standards. “Westerners consider their democratic model as the only viable one,” he told me, somehow managing to look professorial even in a bike helmet. “An inflexible model can easily become an alien imposition. Our country is not America. We are different. Yes, we share common values, but we have to make a democracy that takes our culture and values into account.”

Rwandans believe most of the pain they’ve experienced over the past century, culminating in the genocide, directly results from Western values. European explorers stumbled into the country searching for the source of the Nile, a quest that prompted numerous expeditions in the 19th century. A succession of colonial overlords, first Germans, then Belgians, played off the country’s three main groups—the Twa, a pygmoid group of hunter-gathers, the Hutu, and the Tutsi—against each other.

At the end of World War II, a new generation of Belgian administrators began putting Hutus in charge. Giving power to the largest ethnic group seemed logical in a period of decolonization, but when Belgium finally left the country in 1962, chaos ensued.

“Colonialism came in, favored one group, then favored another, and then left,” says University of Southern California professor Amy Marczewski Carnes, program manager for USC’s Shoah Foundation. “Decolonization laid the groundwork for the genocide.”

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Three takes are necessary before the director is satisfied with the morning’s work. The Bike Rwanda group is exhausted, and the film crew is ready for lunch. As a production assistant unhooks Kagame’s wireless microphone, he motions me over for more conversation.

He’s concerned that I not misinterpret his earlier remarks. He admires America so much that all of his children attend U.S. colleges. What he does not like, he says, are the New York Times and the Washington Post.

“The cynicism of your media makes them believe that if things are smooth and stable in Africa there must be something hidden and wrong. Rwanda is clean and safe with an economy growing more than 7 percent a year, but they write about soldiers on the streets of Kigali.

“There are more than 150,000 heavily armed guerrillas living in refugee camps just across the Congo border that want to destroy this government. Our soldiers are meant to reassure Rwandans that never again will they be attacked. They are also a visible warning to those who would do us harm that there is a line that can’t be crossed.”

The next destination is Lake Kivu, a pristine body of water that straddles Rwanda’s border with the Congo. The only road there leads through a small town whose residents pour into the street as the presidential SUV approaches. It’s an unscripted moment, and some of the cameramen are missing.

When President Kagame exits the car, adults going home for lunch and excited children heading home from school surge toward him, singing a song from his 2017 reelection campaign, “There’s No Fight.” It tells the story of the RPF’s desperate 1990 escape from government forces intent on its destruction. Short of food and winter clothing, Tutsi rebels raised in Ugandan refugee camps found refuge alongside the bands of gorillas American primatologist Dian Fossey had died trying to protect five years before.

Just as God protected Kagame in the mountains,

Now that same God protects us all.

The following day, the PBS crew heads to those same mountains, where the president will escort Greenberg high into Volcanoes National Park to meet some of Rwanda’s most iconic residents: gorillas, still Rwanda’s most valuable attraction. En route to the jungle, Kagame wants to talk more about America.

“When I go to the U.S. I like to visit New York, Chicago, and L.A., not Washington, D.C.,” he smiles. “I hate going to the State Department because it’s just politics with them and you end up doing nothing.”

Kagame’s goal on business trips is to meet American businesspeople who will invest in Rwanda. “Instead of relying on USAID, I’d rather look for a private company that will come here and create good jobs,” he says. “That’s what builds a country. I’d rather host a Chamber of Commerce tour than a delegation of state governors.”

Rwanda underscored its determination to join the international business community in 2008 by withdrawing from la Francophonie and making English the official language in secondary education. The following year it joined the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Not all Americans starting new enterprises in Rwanda are businesspeople. Crystal Rugege is a computer scientist who spent seven years in Silicon Valley working for IBM before moving to Rwanda six years ago to create a Kigali campus for Carnegie Mellon University. Already 100 students have graduated with degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and information technology. Next year she will open a larger campus with an innovation incubator that will accommodate 300 students.

Born in Champaign, Ill., to parents from Rwanda and Uganda, Rugege has found a home in Rwanda. “The country,” she says, “offers a results-oriented, business-friendly environment and has serious students dedicated to developing the East African region.”

The Rwandan government hopes Kigali will become the center of Silicon 1,000 Hills, but until that happens tourism remains the largest industry, generating $400 million a year, 5 percent of total GDP. The United States already accounts for a third of the country’s visitors, and the number should grow when RwandAir starts flying to New York in August.

Rwanda already has spent more than $310 million to improve tourism infrastructure. Private developers are pledging $144 million to construct new hotels. Most will be built in the capital, but the more luxurious properties will accommodate travelers who come to see mountain gorillas. Last year, more than 22,000 foreign visitors paid $16.8 million for the $750 permits allowing them to take an arduous hike through a rainforest to watch the gorillas from afar. The revenue stream will increase this year, since the price of the gorilla-watching permits was recently doubled to $1,500.

“Rwanda’s tourist attractions will adopt the Tahiti pricing model instead of the mass marketing strategy found in Hawaii,” explains Rwanda tourism marketing manager Linda Mutesi. “We believe a premium product merits a premium price.”

When Paul Kagame began designing a new constitution for Rwanda, most Western governments, including that of the United States, advised him to create a system of quotas in which government jobs, college scholarships, bank loans, and so forth would be apportioned between Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa based on their share of the total population. Kagame refused. Segmenting Rwandan society along ethnic lines was the primary cause of the genocide, he believed. There would be no more ethnic set-asides. The new Rwanda would be One Rwanda.

In today’s America, the idea of a melting pot has become a microaggression. Since so many Americans no longer believe in our national motto, perhaps we should give it to Rwanda. E pluribus unum certainly describes the One Rwanda policy.

David DeVoss is editor of the East-West News Service in Los Angeles.